Michael Fried

In the opening lines of the Beach Boys 1964 hit, “In My Room,” Brian Wilson portrays the bedroom and domestic space in general as a place of retreat and security, a world that one can “tell their secrets to.”  Yet, as the narrator confesses to a growing feeling of fragility in this relation, the cavernous soundtrack comes to introduce an unnerving openness that belies this sense of safe enclosure.  This testimonial to isolation and its celebration of interiority is additionally compromised by a complex overlay of harmonies which render the individual voice strangely multiple.  In these dynamics, the song dramatizes the transformation of the home that would occur under Postmodernism as a once discrete and private space would be shot through with its exterior.  While the historical forces behind this transformation are multiple, the most prominent include: the increasing ubiquity and reach of media, the explosion of postwar advertising, the birth of suburbia and the “always on call” employment model of late capitalism.  As the convergence point for these forces, the home in the second half of the 20th century came to relinquish its enduring historical function which Gaston Bachelard describes as “shelter[ing] day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
This transformation of the home is at the center of the work of photographers John Divola, Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall.  While the specific strategies vary between artists, collectively their work visualizes these tensions by presenting the home as somehow uninhabitable, both literally and figuratively speaking.  In these images, the expectation of sanctuary that Wilson and Bachelard describe clash violently with the forces of late capitalism described above, fueling a self-reflexive dialogue in which the operation of the camera is rendered complicit in the larger processes of defamiliarization and alienation in which the home is enmeshed.  For example, John Divola surreptitiously enters abandoned seaside homes in Southern California.  Chronicling his presence through flares and light anomalies, the photographer introduces a tension between the constructedness of the image, the unwanted presence of the photographer and the decay and degradation of the spaces in which these acts take place.  Similarly, Gregory Crewdson creates elaborate, excessively theatrical images of the home which question the association of the domestic with the authenticity and interiority.  Finally, Jeff Wall’s portrayal of the home reveals an intrusion of the world of images into the domestic sphere by self-consciously fashioning the drama of the home according to overwrought types and conventions.  In these works, the image of the home emerges as a space of alienation, but also as the center point for the convergence of historical and technical forces which would shape subjectivity and the politics of the image.

This paper takes up the philosophical problem of modernism as it arises with respect to dance. While the “of” in the phrase “philosophy of dance” is most often construed as an objective genitive—philosophical which takes dance as its object—the “of” can also be construed as a subjective genitive: philosophical reflection that belongs to dance itself. The paper seeks to clarify the conditions for the possibility of this kind of approach. In the first half of the paper, I characterize a standard approach to philosophy of dance that I take to be implicit in and shared by several attempts to adapt conceptions of modernism, which were developed in the first instance to explain changes in the visual arts, to dance. Once we make the standard approach explicit, I argue, it becomes clear that this approach fails to clarify any sense in which philosophical reflection might genuinely belong to dance that is art. The approach shows only that philosophical reflection is in some sense present in the work of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham or Yvonne Rainer. To say of a form of philosophical reflection that it belongs to dance, I argue, is to make a stronger and a more compelling claim: that there is a necessary relation between the aesthetic and the philosophical achievement of the work. In the second half of the paper, drawing on the conception of modernism developed by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, I develop an alternative approach. Following them, I argue that modernism is the condition an art enters when it enters the condition of philosophy. I show that this approach is able to make sense of the following possibility: a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence obtains between the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of some forms of dance. Through elaborating this idea, I show that the alternative approach affords a far more compelling point of departure for something deserving the title “philosophy of dance”.

In David Joselit’s influential essay ‘Painting Beside Itself’ he examines the place of painting in a digital economy where the image of the artwork is disseminated globally, and its power (both politically and economically) is inflated correspondingly. He describes paintings that consciously engage with networks as ‘transitive’ in that they are submitted to infinite dislocations, fragmentations and degradations, escaping the modernist trap of reification.  The centrifugal effect of the Internet on the dissemination, reception and marketing of the painting as image, in an age where images proliferate as never before, supersedes the significance of the painting as object. What is at stake is the concept that painting (both as verb and noun) maintains fidelity to experience, and that its value can only be judged before the work itself.

In my paper I will examine this claim with reference to Hegel’s definition of Art in relation to Spirit, to test Joselit’s proposition that art is now at its terminus. In defiance of the glossy/operatic/diaristic/ironic/satirical/primitive/psychedelic imagery that has come to define our era, I call for a return to authenticity by fastening to the world in willful naivety, buoyed by Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the primacy of phenomenology and ‘indirect ontology’ in ‘Eye and Mind’ and through a reappraisal of Michael Freid’s concepts of Absorption and Theatricality, to provide a centripetal balance that returns the object and the place of painting back to itself.

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism's transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: "a work needs only to be interesting".

This essay is on pottery as art and archaeology and the role of touch and how we view pottery as artists, archaeologists and as viewers in the gallery or museum. To make pottery, the potter needs to touch and shape clay by hand. The potter uses fire to set those shapes and decoration for all time. People who use pottery touch the object in different ways depending on its purpose. The archaeologists who recover pottery from their sites, touch pottery to recover, conserve and interpret finds. The pottery on display in museums or art galleries moves against the very nature of pottery as storage vessels, serving dishes or cooking vessels and usually cannot be touched.

More thoughts on the meanings of garbage in contemporary art:

"This essay focuses on Brazilian–American artist Vik Muniz's 2008 Pictures of Garbage and the pendant 2010 documentary on their making, Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker. Muniz enlists a group of Brazilian garbage pickers as subjects and participants in the construction of their own portraits, using garbage picked from a landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro. The use of garbage as a material draws attention to global patterns of exploitation that produce both the waste itself and the poverty of the garbage pickers. However, this essay argues that Muniz's social aims are undermined by formal incoherences within the portraits and their subsequent recommodification on the global art market. Using Michael Fried's theories, the essay identifies a tension in Pictures of Garbage between the theatricality of the subjects' poses, drawn from canonical European paintings, and the absorptive qualities of the garbage itself. This dissonance reflects Muniz's own split position as a cosmopolitan global artist compelled to represent Brazilian identity through associations with base materiality."

A reading of Robert Morris' early minimalist sculptures with regard to Michael Fried's abhorrescence of theatricality; an interpretation of the temporality implied in Morris' "duration" as opposed to Fried's "presentness". Finally a confrontation of the still subject-centered embodied experience of phenomenology - on which Morris relies - with the heterogenesis of the human subject as articulated by Emmanuel Levinas.

Twenty-three years after his death, Clement Greenberg is still someone to be taken into account in the world of contemporary art criticism, especially when we speak of Modernism. One cannot minimize the importance of his theory, usually re-ferred to as formalist, or the influence it has had on the generations of artists from the 1930s to the present day. It is also a fact that, on one hand, there are multiple defend-ers and followers of his theory, but on the other hand, he also generates strong criti-cism and meets several attempts to challenge his aesthetic principles. The goal of this dissertation is to analyze the implications of Greenberg’s theory in the course of mod-ern art, basically in painting but also in sculpture, using a corpus of texts written by Greenberg since the end of the 1930s to the 1980s, explaining the dissensions between Greenberg and the other art critics. This will encompass the course of Modernist art from Impressionism to Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, and then polemizing the commentary that major names in art criticism, such as Michael Fried, Leo Stein-berg, and Rosalind Krauss made to the work of Greenberg. Consequently, it is argued that the journey made across 80 years of painting and sculpture by Greenberg demon-strates how the vision of one man became as important and critical as that of the art-ists themselves.

Passados vinte e três anos da sua morte, Clement Greenberg continua a ser um nome a ter em conta na crítica de arte contemporânea, nomeadamente quando falamos de Modernismo. Não se pode escamotear a importância da sua teoria, geralmente apelidada de formalista, nem a influência que a mesma teve em gerações de artistas, desde os anos 30 do século XX até aos nossos dias. Também é um facto que, se por um lado, encontramos múltiplos defensores e até discípulos, por outro gerou fortes críticas e tentativas várias de desconstrução dos seus princípios artísticos. Partindo da leitura de um corpus de textos de Greenberg escritos desde o final da década de 30 até à década de 80 do século XX, procura-se, ao longo desta dissertação, analisar as implicações da teoria de Greenberg no percurso da arte moderna, essencialmente na pintura mas também na escultura, explicitando as dissensões entre Greenberg e outros críticos de arte. Mostrar-se-á, assim, o percurso da arte modernista desde o Impressionismo até Jasper Johns e Robert Rauschenberg, polemizando as referências que nomes maiores da crítica de arte, como sejam Michael Fried, Leo Steinberg e Rosalind Krauss, fazem à obra de Greenberg. No final, pretende-se que o percurso feito ao longo de cerca de 80 anos de pintura e escultura demonstre como a visão de um só homem se revelou tão importante e fundamental quanto a dos artistas.

In dieser Arbeit wird mit einer Darstellung von Lambert Wiesings Auffassung der " Unzeitlichkeit des Bildes" angefangen. In einer zweiten eher kritischen Phase, werden verschiedene Probleme und Einwände erwähnt, die Wiesings Idee einer radikalen Unzeitlichkeit des Bildes in Frage stellen. Drittens wird versucht, den Ansatz von Wiesing zu nuancieren. Meine Hypothese ist, dass diese Idee, das Bild sei unzeitlich, eigentlich einer reichen Tradition begegnet: einer theoretischen und ästhetischen Tradition, die man unter anderem bei Lessing, Kant oder noch Michael Fried beobachtet. Aus diesem Standpunkt ist es lohnenswert zu beschreiben, wie bestimmte Bilder die Zeit " unterbrechen", " lösen" oder " aufheben" können.

"This thesis brings together discourses concerning indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language to bear upon the photographic image in an attempt to open the parameters of current photographic discourse and carve a place for nontraditional photographic practices. Each of these facets – indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language – links photography to the body and solicits an embodied response from the viewer by placing the viewer’s body at the center of the experience of beholding images. Mes vœux (My Wishes/My Vows, 1988-1991) is a photographic installation by multimedia French artist Annette Messager comprised of layers of black and white photographs depicting intimate close-ups of body parts, each framed under glass and hung from the wall by twine in a circular formation. Scraps of paper framed in the same manner overlay the photographs and contain handwritten, repeated words. The photographs and text exist as both images and elements of sculpture.

Mes vœux rejects the metaphor of photography as an illusionistic window giving view to another place and time, and thereby draws attention to the material surface of its photographs, and by way of analogy, the surface of the bodies it depicts. Accumulated layers of metaphoric skin and indexed bodies together construct hybrid photographic bodies the beholder may imaginatively touch, and which, in turn, may affectively touch the beholder to engage a visceral and embodied response. The emotionally suggestive text employs double entendres, puns, and homonyms to condense meaning in an oscillating wordplay that simultaneously causes a collapse and excess of signification.

Mes vœux’s nontraditional format provides contrast to the trend of the “tableau form” of photography discussed at length by Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), in which Fried applies his theory of theatricality, first articulated in his controversial essay challenging minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), to contemporary art photography. Photographic practices such as Messager’s that may be considered theatrical and that do not conform to the “tableau form” are notably absent in contemporary art photography theory as exemplified by Fried, narrowing the discourse and the field of possibility for the medium in art practice. Mes vœux links concepts of touch in visual art with concepts of embodied viewership and theatricality as traced through art history – including the advent of minimalism and the “tableau form” of photography – since the 1960s and binds them together through the medium of photography and the representation of bodies."

The aim of this contribution is to emphasize the stage as a paradigm to look more closely at Wittgenstein’s method. The reversibility between language games and theatrical performances allows us here to explore the human voice in three steps : the stage enables to enlighten the expressiveness of human language, to display the heuristic dimension of language games and the plasticity of the inner/outer distinction.

This book presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami’s films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.

Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami’s most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love.

Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy shows that the philosophical significance of film consists less in its ability to make a positive contribution to theorising than in how it beguiles, goads, and rebukes it.

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object.

This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time.

Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry.

The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

Au tournant du 21e siècle, le cinéma européen contemporain connaît un certain renouveau majeur. Trois grandes tendances portées par des cinéastes particuliers émergent du paysage cinématographique. Les frères Dardenne en Belgique, Dogme95 avec Lars von Trier et Thomas Vinterberg au Danemark et la Nouvelle Vague roumaine avec notamment Cristi Puiu comme chef de file. Leur apport esthétique du beau est intimement lié à leur éthique. C’est pourquoi ce mémoire examine plusieurs paramètres de la mise en scène : l’image, le jeu d’acteur et la donnée sonore, comme nouveaux jalons dans l’histoire contemporaine du cinéma européen. Leur démarche sur les questions du vrai et du faux, de l’authenticité et du réel cinématographique face à la théâtralité et ses artifices, est particulièrement mise en évidence au sujet de la réception spectatorielle. Ces réalisateurs proposent en effet un cinéma axé autour d’une réappropriation de la mise en scène pour le spectateur qui se trouve physiquement et/ou métaphysiquement entre l’idée de l’absorbement et/ou de la distanciation. S’imprégnant du long héritage des avant-gardes sur les questions du réel et du cinéma fictionnel contemporain depuis l’apparition du numérique, leur cinéma est particulièrement paradoxal sur la place du spectateur, car ils le considèrent désormais comme émancipé.

In a letter written to Phillip Leider, then editor of Artforum, before the 1967 publication of “Art and Objecthood” in that same journal, Michael Fried wrote: “I keep toying with the idea, crazy as it sounds, of having a section in this sculpture-theater essay on how corrupt sensibility is par excellence faggot sensibility[. . .].” This essay analyzes this statement in relation to Fried’s published theorization of “objecthood” and “theatricality” as “corrupted and perverted.” The essay asks what exactly constituted a “perverted” sensibility for Fried and what the implications are of aligning that perversion with homosexuality. The proposed answer is located in the manner by which the minimalist relation to viewers disrupts the “coherent” image of modernism—a relation that exits the clearly demarcated enclosures of serious aesthetic judgment and enters into the engaging and absorbing vagaries of desire.

This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality (1980)—by constellating Fried’s work alongside Péter Szondi’s writings on modern drama and Paul de Man’s theories of allegory. This theoretical juxtaposition reveals, first, that the phenomenon Fried describes as “absorption” parallels a form of mimetic, bourgeois drama hegemonic in European theatre from the time of Diderot to Ibsen, and second, that Fried’s concept of “theatricality” corresponds significantly to the notion of 􏰀allegory􏰁 developed in de Man’s work. Fried’s writings thus advance a theory of modernity organized around the rise and fall of mimesis in performance, one in which mimetic drama comes programmatically to eclipse allegory and theatricality during the Enlightenment, only to then fall into crisis around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of modernism, understood as a moment marked by the reemergence of allegory and theatricality in the arts. In this way, Fried’s views of theatricality overlap considerably with the origins of postdramatic theatre demonstrated influentially in theatre studies by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and these overlaps require our field to rethink now well-established positions on Fried and Lehmann alike. A new view of theatre history is required, one that accounts both for the emergence of supposedly postdramatic forms and for this general reappearance of theatricality and allegory in modern times.

If communication, reportage, description, and judgment are key elements of the receptive role played by art-critical publications, it’s important to acknowledge on specific occasions such journals also have a productive mediatory function, too. They don’t merely disseminate as if passively a pre-given situation, but may actively construct that situation, define its infrastructure and parameters, and do so whilst under the guise of reportage. In these cases art criticism becomes a dialectic of reception and production, both constituted by and constituting its objects of study.

This paper analyses the early years of the influential art journal October according to the thematic indicated above. Beginning in 1976, October established itself as  arguably the foremost art-critical voice of a burgeoning postmodernism. Significant essays published between 1976-1981 on the index, the expanded field of sculpture, allegory, and photography served as trajectories leading to a deeper understanding of postmodernism and an emergent generation of artists sceptical of their late-modernist inheritance. However, this paper contends that October didn’t merely report and analyse then-recent cultural developments, but actively contributed and constituted those developments through a dialogical relationship between critics and artists.

Therefore suggesting that any critical-historical reappraisal of postmodernism would be incomplete without apprehending October’s collaboration with artists in moving beyond late-modernism, this paper aims to demonstrate that much of our contemporary sense of what comprises postmodernism for the visual arts is fundamentally rooted in the intellectual positions advanced by October during 1976-1981. It shall, then, succinctly explicate key arguments vis-à-vis postmodernism established within the journal’s pages, thereby presenting the capability of the art press to intermingle the reception and production of emergent cultural hegemonies.

As the key term in Michael Fried’s criticism and art history, theatricality remains an influential and contentious concept. In defending its validity, Fried has repudiated social historical interpretations and alternatives, arguing for the independence of his thesis from these concerns. This essay nevertheless proposes that an anxiety regarding the effects of capitalism on art constitutes the disavowed kernel of Fried’s theory of theatricality. It does so in three ways: first, by examining the places in Fried’s critical and historical writing where theatricality is shadowed by exploitative relationships; second, by tracing theatricality back to its source, the art criticism of Denis Diderot, where it was closely linked to concerns regarding profit-seeking and exploitation in drawing, theater, painting, and patronage; and third, by investigating the ways in which the work Fried called ‘literalist’ might have provoked similar misgivings. On the basis of this evidence, Fried’s argument is shown to be driven and distorted by a political unconscious structured around the very issues its author has consistently dismissed as immaterial to art history. Theatricality is Fried’s way of doubly shielding art from the effects of capitalism—displacing them onto an aesthetic category, and deeming that category art’s ultimate liability and challenge.

Mediated Breath examines a wide range of possibilities of understanding and redefining the context in which the corporeal function of breathing is represented in art. during the performative turn, and in relation to contemporary debates around presence and relational aesthetics.
The thesis aims to examine Beckett's Breath, both as a minimalist art work in order to see how it might contribute to debates led by Fried around minimalism and (anti)theatricality, and as a text for and related to contemporary intermedial production in order to explore how intermedial art practices contribute to new understandings, for example of the body's intermedial relationship to the world. The above issues are addressed, in relation to the special significance that respiration acquires by means of an artistic system.
The thesis examines, in particular, Beckett's Breath (1969) in the spectrum of intermedia aesthetics, high-modernist art criticism and theories on theatricality, so as to comprehend Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation, in the context of the interface between the theatre and the visual arts. Beckett's playlet demonstrates a decisive moment in the history of theatrical experimentation, in part because of the new relationship it developed towards the formal possibilities of the theatrical event.

The exposition of the components of a medium in skeletal fonn is pivotal for understanding aspects of Beckett's intermedia practice. Breath is analysed, alongside Michael Fried's seminal essay on minimalism "Art and Objecthood" (1967) and the "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit" (1949). Beckett's final piece of discursive writing. considered within the context of its subject matter, the tension between abstraction and expression, the dilemma of artistic expression and the impossibility of expression in painting.
The "Three Dialogues," also, illuminate specific aspects of the playlet, principally Beckett's decision to eradicate the text and the human figure, hence, the interest lies in the ways that Beckettian aesthetics translates into practice. This reading attempts to provide a theoretical model for thinking about the intersection of critical discourses in the visual arts and the theatre, more specifically about tbe notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts. In this perspective, Breath serves as an indication of the fonnative, productive role of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and not as an external attack on it. Breath, as a representative piece of minimal ism in the theatre, is paradigmatic of Beckett's aesthetics of impoverishment and his fidelity to failure. As such it resists recuperation and can be seen as a critique of the conditions of art making, display, marketing and interpretation, in contrast to minimalist art, which became dependent on these processes.

https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.594109

The thesis examines how the artists’ book as an object and the artists’ book as a process work in opposition, whereby the display of process that produces the book’s pieces undermines the whole, perfectly realised art object on which the art market is based. The artists’ book is situated within the Visual Art movements of Modernism and Formalism and Postmodernism; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, to address the transition from the book as an object (performance) to contemporary notions of the book as an experience, that engages in performativity. The thesis documents the “performative turn,” portraying the collapsing of binaries between the subject (artist and viewer) and the object (the work of art). This involves the application of numerous seminal texts from theoreticians including Michael Fried, Roland Barthes, J.L Austin, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler that realise the shift from the ‘linguistic turn’ (culture as text) to the ‘performative turn’ (culture as performance). Ultimately, the thesis emphasises the importance of performativity as a critical strategy within the study of visual culture and suggests interpretation as a fragile affair that offers a critique of art criticism as they have been traditionally practiced.

What is the place of art criticism in the world today? The discipline that was once concerned with the evaluation of visual art according to rational principles, relied for its operations on notions of artistic genius and its eternal bedfellows: talent, perception, interpretation and speculation, yet these attributes can today only mask the complex phenomena that underpin art in the age of advanced technology, mass media and (dis)information. The notion of art criticism contains within itself a demand for clarity and for an explicit exposition of all the steps that lead towards a conclusion. Implicitly, art criticism feeds on the liberal fiction of universal communicability and transparency of thoughts and artworks. But for Theodor Adorno (1997), for instance, the value of an artwork is not measured by how well it communicates, but on the contrary by how much it resists pre-given standards of judgement. In this view art is always an act of violence towards thought, truth and understanding, for no other reason that what art does is to rupture familiar, conventional forms of knowledge and power and their standard attributes: reason, negation, contradiction and lack (Foucault 1996), making it possible to inhabit the sense of 'something happening' (Lyotard 1984). The question for art criticism then becomes not how to identify the genius among the dunces, but how to account for strategies of experimentation, curiosity and doubt that are capable of creating meaningful perceptions out of random and accidental bits of matter (Golding 2001). Gilles Deleuze might say that the task of the art critic is to account for the way a plane of immanence is being built.